Dorothy L. Sayers and the woman question : an honors thesis (HONRS 499)

This thesis focuses upon Dorothy L. Sayers' views of the difficulties faced by educated women in England during the early decades of the twentieth century. It examines her personal experience as a university woman through letters written during her years at Oxford (1912-1915). Three of her later works, her best selling novel Gaudy Night, "Eros in Academe," and "Are Women Human?", are then analyzed to reveal her perspective on the place of intellectual women in society. Sayers was an advocate of higher education for women, but she opposed the contemporary belief that women who aspired to university life had to suppress their emotional being and become like men. Ultimately, Sayers aspired to a world in which intellectual and emotional qualities were integrated in both men and women.